I would agree on the above for one reason only. I have a couple of friends who are gear junkies they've bought vintage cabs old stock gear etc to create that mystery tone. Both the guys are now kemper owners and they gig regular. The kempar is light weight and ideal to be used for gigging. It can easily be taking on a plane as light hand luggage. Try doing this with your vintage 1980 marshall head at the mercy of baggage handlers. At the click of a button you can have that perfect sound or if you'd prefer EVH Brown tone click your button and your cabs will be singing lovely. Yeah they are an expensive piece of kit but if you get the chance to try one out, give it a blast.

Its not just the same, really. When you have the real thing and the digital side by side.. just no

I doubt you could really tell the difference between the two if they were side by side and you were blindfolded.

While there may be a very small difference (And it's getting even more negligible as time goes on) between a Kemper/AxeFX and the real thing, the Kemper/AxeFX has convenience on its side. If you're doing a gig, what are you going to bring to the show? $10,000+ worth of rare amps and cabs that take hours to load onto the stage while breaking your back carrying all of it around, taking forever to set every little thing up correctly (Pedals, amp settings, cables, and all) or would you rather take one small $2,000 lightweight metal box that'll give you ~95% of the same tone that all that expensive gear gives you? I can tell you for sure that the average concert goer won't give a shit about all that gear you're lugging around. Only the die hard fans (particularly the die hard fans of the guitarist, so pretty niche market there) will care about your guitar tone.

Well it's part of the new tech world we live in, would you still consider being that type of guy who still doesn't know how to turn on a laptop or do you still have that brick phone that you won't update. The technology is moving forward with guitar gear, they have discovered a way to do it. I agree on the above for that reason alone and if you still want to be a dinosaur let them guys play on what they are comfortable playing on. Plus it is down to that individual to make that choice.

I read an interesting article from Accept's Wolf Hoffman he recorded some of the Stalingrad album on his Kemper. He decided not to mention this until the album was out. He then said in so many words if anyone could pick out the tracks played on the kemper he'd give that amplifier to that person. Basically knowing no one would be able to pick out which tracks were recorded with it.He mentions using the Kemper in this interview here :The tones on Stalingrad are killer. What was your amp setup? — Curtis Zwible

Here’s a little-known secret: I recorded the whole album with a Kemper Profiling Amplifier [which provides a range of emulations and lets players create a sonic profile of their own amp]. I came across it a year ago, and when we started working on the album, we really put it to the test. We had my regular setup, and we fed everything into the Kemper. We A/B’d the sounds, and they were identical. It’s the same sound, just coming out of a different box.

So I used my handful of old Marshall, Randall and EVH amps, along with my main Wizard amp, and we fed them all into the Kemper amp. Then we used the Kemper to fire them back. When Stalingrad first came out, I didn’t tell anyone that I used a Kemper, because you know how people are. They’d be like, “Oh, I can hear that it’s not a real Marshall.” But now that the album is out and people like the tone, I’m telling everyone about the Kemper.

I read an interesting article from Accept's Wolf Hoffman he recorded some of the Stalingrad album on his Kemper. He decided not to mention this until the album was out. He then said in so many words if anyone could pick out the tracks played on the kemper he'd give that amplifier to that person. Basically knowing no one would be able to pick out which tracks were recorded with it.He mentions using the Kemper in this interview here :The tones on Stalingrad are killer. What was your amp setup? — Curtis Zwible

Here’s a little-known secret: I recorded the whole album with a Kemper Profiling Amplifier [which provides a range of emulations and lets players create a sonic profile of their own amp]. I came across it a year ago, and when we started working on the album, we really put it to the test. We had my regular setup, and we fed everything into the Kemper. We A/B’d the sounds, and they were identical. It’s the same sound, just coming out of a different box.

So I used my handful of old Marshall, Randall and EVH amps, along with my main Wizard amp, and we fed them all into the Kemper amp. Then we used the Kemper to fire them back. When Stalingrad first came out, I didn’t tell anyone that I used a Kemper, because you know how people are. They’d be like, “Oh, I can hear that it’s not a real Marshall.” But now that the album is out and people like the tone, I’m telling everyone about the Kemper.

So basically kemper amps are the modern day holy grail of amps and tone

So you guys think that if Randy would profile his Marshall and use the Kemper live to duplicate the sound on stage he would sound like THIS ? You can totally forget that. While the Kemper can duplicate the Tone of an amp it can't duplicate the dynamics going on of an old tube amp running hot through a speaker cab. That's the complain of many people using the Kemper live. And it's not that difficult to figure out because with the interaction between the speakers <=> output transformers <=> power tubes <=> preamp tubes there are so many variables going on that it is impossible to duplicate without the real stuff.

So why have so many great guitarists went down the digital road and why would they say you cannot tell what is digital and what is a vintage amp etc ...To settle the argument ask yourself why they have made the change, you can play through shit cabs and its the amp that'll give you that programmed sound of any sampled amplifier...Better for maintenance you dont have to worry about tubes blowing, warming up, being effected with the cold etc. But it is down to the player, some guys like them and some don't. Very much the same reason drummers use triggers and some don't.

So you guys think that if Randy would profile his Marshall and use the Kemper live to duplicate the sound on stage he would sound like THIS ? You can totally forget that. While the Kemper can duplicate the Tone of an amp it can't duplicate the dynamics going on of an old tube amp running hot through a speaker cab. That's the complain of many people using the Kemper live. And it's not that difficult to figure out because with the interaction between the speakers <=> output transformers <=> power tubes <=> preamp tubes there are so many variables going on that it is impossible to duplicate without the real stuff.

You need to try a Fractal XL+ with 7.02 FW through some decent studio monitors like higher end Adams or a couple Clear wedges.... and if after doing so you can still make the above comment then maybe you need a hearing check up or maybe you need to learn how to tweak the Fractal....

You defeintly need to spend some time on the Fractal Audio forum, the Fractal not only reproduces tones but it also reproduces the exact feel and dynamics of playing through a tube amp as well. When Cliff Chase and his people sit down with famous guitarists and dial in thier tone, the famous artists can no longer distinguish the tone/feel/dynamics of their amps to the Fractal presets.

I would agree on the above for one reason only. I have a couple of friends who are gear junkies they've bought vintage cabs old stock gear etc to create that mystery tone. Both the guys are now kemper owners and they gig regular. The kempar is light weight and ideal to be used for gigging. It can easily be taking on a plane as light hand luggage. Try doing this with your vintage 1980 marshall head at the mercy of baggage handlers. At the click of a button you can have that perfect sound or if you'd prefer EVH Brown tone click your button and your cabs will be singing lovely. Yeah they are an expensive piece of kit but if you get the chance to try one out, give it a blast.

Its not just the same, really. When you have the real thing and the digital side by side.. just no

I doubt you could really tell the difference between the two if they were side by side and you were blindfolded.

While there may be a very small difference (And it's getting even more negligible as time goes on) between a Kemper/AxeFX and the real thing, the Kemper/AxeFX has convenience on its side. If you're doing a gig, what are you going to bring to the show? $10,000+ worth of rare amps and cabs that take hours to load onto the stage while breaking your back carrying all of it around, taking forever to set every little thing up correctly (Pedals, amp settings, cables, and all) or would you rather take one small $2,000 lightweight metal box that'll give you ~95% of the same tone that all that expensive gear gives you? I can tell you for sure that the average concert goer won't give a shit about all that gear you're lugging around. Only the die hard fans (particularly the die hard fans of the guitarist, so pretty niche market there) will care about your guitar tone.

10 000$ of stuff?? My 1987 marshall cost me 800$ used + the marshall Cab.. take 5 minutes to put the stock on stage. And the real tone

I will say this, that whoever in this thread mentioned Kemper, annoyed me by thinking the Kemper was on the same level as the Fractal, so much so that it made me spend the last 12 hours today and about 5 hours yesterday just listening to more Kemper profiles, videos and reading more about it... It had been a few years since I listened to any clips of anyone demoing a Kemper.... And I wasn't impressed a few years ago with the few demos I heard of it and I didn't understand what advantages it had over the Fractal Axe Fx 2 XL+.

Well, I found out about http://www.topjimi.com/today! And I listend to litterally every sample on the website as well as every clip I could find elsewhere, and I'm blown away by the amount of great tones to be had in the huge number of all the profiles available on that site!

I'm also impressed with profiles I heard by the amp factory, sinmix, stltones, tone hawk studios, and mbrittprofiles!

I didn't hear a bad profile in any of the profiles by any of the above people that sell profiles. And wow they are inexpensive, I can buy ever profile on Top JImis site for only about $250.

And, you can get the Kemper Rack plus the floorboard controller for only $2,268 on sweetwater. I paid $2,250 for my Fractal XL+ and it didn't even come with a foot controller, you got to pay a extra $650 to get that. With the money a person could save on that you could almost have enough to buy every profile all of the above profilers offer for sale, which would probably be close to five thousand profiles, maybe even ten thousand profiles, haven't added them all up on those sites, but it's a lot of them, and I want them all.

Here's the thing that's really got me SOLD right now on selling my Fractal and getting the Kemper that I just realized today.... With the Kemper, you can just buy a profile that was already made by an expert, then slap a little reverb/delay on it to taste and you are DONE! And if you do wanna make a small adjustment here and there it's got knobs like a real amp.

And bottom line is, I'm not a fucking Tweaker, I hate Tweaking, I suck at tweaking tones, and I just want to fucking play guitar and have tones that sound fucking killer!

I'm sure the Fractal is capable of getting the tones in the Kemper -IF- you know how to tweak the motherfucker and want to waste all that fucking time tweaking. Fuck that bullshit. I don't want to know how to cook my own food, I want to pay a fucking master chef to prepare my dinners you know what I'm saying. I just wanna plug my guitar into something and fucikin be set, sound killer through a bad ass amp profile, then turn the knob and have another bad ass profile etc. I wanna focus on playing music not fucking tweaking.

And Godamn Fractal keeps releasing all these stupid FW updates to where everyone has to redo everything and if you go on axeexchange presets that were made on old FW won't even sound good anymore on new FW. Where with the Kemper profiles will sound the same even when new FW comes out.

I wasted about $300 buying a lot of the Ownhammer and Fractal Cab Packs, and man that was a headache, having all those different options and combinations available, never knowing which combinations I would like best, always second guessing myself, and I'd take a preset that seemed to have potential, and I'd start tweaking the fucker and would think I had it sounding pretty good after about 15 minutes and then tweak some more and think it was even better, and then I'd switch back over to my favorite preset the Fractal comes with which is Mark Days HBE and realize the preset I made sucked. I even tried to use the Mark Day preset as a starting point for making my own presets and in the end they always turned to shit compared to the original preset I started with.

And really the fucking Mark Day Preset is the only fucking preset I've ever taken a real liking to in the Fractal.

So to me that's real limiting to not know how to create a awesome sounding preset without tweaking it so much you fuck it all up, and I'm real bad about fucking with the EQ and boosting the 4k by about 4 or 5 DB and boosting the 2k too.... it sounds good at the moment but then when I compare to what I like that I hear others doing then I realize how what I made sounds like shit.

I fucking hate tweaking.

I've been buying Fractal racks since they first came out around 2005, and I've tried and fuckin tried, watched all the goddamn tutorials and read every forum post over the years and still I'm sitting here thinking how nice it'd be just to Pay Mark Day or someone like that to fly to my house and tweak me a couple hundred killer presets!

So what I'm saying is this shit is just a fucking waste for anyone that don't want to have to tweak to get the tones they want.

Also a couple very minor things I noticed, yeah the Fractal is very quiet, but still the Kemper is even more quiet becaue it don't even use cooling fans, and, the Kemper controller has spillover so you can switch seamless through presets, and the Fractal don't, yeah you could program it in there, but that'd be a bitch.

And from what I heard today, with the latest Kemper FW their delays and reverbs are on par with Styman, which I always thought Stryman was bettwer than the Fractal. And it appears that Kempers pitch effects walks all over Fractals.

I had thought about keeping the Fractal and just using it for effects and using the Kemper for the amps, but after all the research the last two days, I feel confident with Kempers effects.

The top Jimmy fuckin nails AFD tone as well as VH tone, and that Lee Jackson pack sounds badass, especially the Crazy Babies riffs, and they got so many more amps than Fractal such as the ENGL Ritchie Blackmore, YJM100, and Steve Stevens custom amp. They got every amp Fractal has and then even more!

So, I'm glad this discussion came up in this thread because it triggered me to do more research into Kemper and I think I'm gonna be a lot more satisfied with Kemper than the Fracatl I have.

Cool thing about most of the demos of top jimi and the other companies is, most of them are just showing just the profile loaded into the kemper direct into a daw, with no post processing added, and no shitty compressed audio or effects or anything. So you know you are gonna pretty much get the same tone you hear in the demo as long as you are using a similar pickup/combination, meaning humbucker/singlecoil. So there's no trickery in it.

I feel at this point that Kemper is superior to the Fractal, unless you just like tweaking shit.

Top Jimi and them other sites already done all the damn tweaking for me, I hear those tones and am just already fantasizing about how I will use them.

I tried a lot of the presets from axe exchange in the past, and they were never that fucking great, not as great as what I hear from the Kemper.

I don't wanna buy Cab Packs and have to create my own presets from the ground up, I just wanna buy profiles and be done with it and just fucking play. I'm not trying to reinvent the wheel when it comes to tones. I just wanna be able to get all my favorite tones from my favorite CDs.

And Fractals Tone Match sucks, it only matches eq, and its near impossible to find good recordings of bare guitar other than the few guitar hero stems etc to tone match too.

Kemper has just won me the fuck over.

Back in the day I used to use a Rocktron Voodu Valve the year they first came out and thought it was awesome how I could just turn the dial to a new preset and get another badass guitar tone (for its time) and I thought this would be what owning a FRactal would turn into except that Fractal would sound even better, yeah the bare amps in the Fractal sound real and great, and the cabs sound great and real, but there's more to getting tones I like than just pairing the perfect amp with the perfect IR! And I don't wanna have to do all that work. I like simple. I like pretty much plug and play.

I like all the things I heard in the Kemper today and all the things I learned about Kemper.

I think Fractal has much of it's community brainwashed like a cult at this point. I'm glad I was finally able to break free and escape this Fractology bullshit!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Little early for me to read all that Romeo but I will do later today or tomorrow. Skimmed through it really quick. Kemper was my original choice over the ax fx a few years ago when I was close to buying one. The same comments were made then as made now. "You can't tell the difference between the real thing and kemper/ax fx". That is true in you tube clips and most people's first experiences with them. The first impression is so impressive when trying them out in person that they are not noticing the little things that they do after a few days or weeks after bringing them home. After reading all the support here I started looking into them again and it's the same comments today as well. But, I will say they are more popular and the majority does say they have improved since their initial releases.

They are the future no doubt. I think part of the problem is that the younger generation will see these and never experience the real thing leading to false comparisons and reviews. You cannot compare a Marshall Plexi or any other amp and an Ax Fx via listening to a YouTube video...there's more to it than that. I am most likely going to sell my 78 Marshall MKII 2204 since there is no doubt my 20th Shiva will be my main amp for years now. With the funds from that I may try out a kemper or ax. Eh what's the worst that can happen? I send t back like everything else

Oh and I saw a couple comments on purchasing packs and amp models and so forth. Some will frown upon it but I would just torrent them or find a repository. I searched a year or two ago and found a ton.

Last comment...I also feel these models once they become truly indistinguishable that they should be 10-15k+ and compensate the manufacturers they are loading into their systems. I'll look it up later but there is no doubt that in the future that if these modelers gain huge mainstream popularity and affecting the sales of Marshall, Fender and other heavy hitters that they will join forces and either want compensation or try to shut them down.

I think there would have been a midpoint transition for Randy before the Kempers and Fractals became a reality. I can see Randy endorsing ESP and Soldanos at some point. The SLO was becoming huge in the late 80s and early 90s and I can picture Randy using those. Those amps lend themselves to Randy's style: they're bright and articulate but provide wallop. But I also get the impression that Randy was naturally curious and probably ever evolving. He struck me as the type of guy that would have kept trying out new products but not necessarily leaving all his old gear behind.

Ok you dinks got to me. After reading around about the ax fx again my impressions as well as others is still the same. Not switching to one at point in time.

So of course I'm looking for something to buy now along the lines of a phaser in the $200-$300 range or a new pedalboard to house all my pedals, along with power supply. The latter could cost as much as $500 for what would be willing to pay. The search for all this led me back to looking at fractals fx8's boards for $999. I have always wanted an enclosed system like that for as long as I have been playing back to 89. Mainly because of Randy's and Pete Cornish's boards have that same enclosed look. After looking up reviews I don't think I have found a bad one. Woke up this morning and said fuck it and ordered it. More surprisingly I didn't know fractal is based is bard out of NH and only about 20 minutes from me. Unit will be deliveredtomorrow so that's cool.

What really got me to buy it is that I will get about $800 for my current pedals if I unload them all. I'll probably keep my analogman sd1 and yellow MXR 3 knob chorus that looks like it just came off the production line. In the end if I keep the fx8 I'll probably have only paid $300 for it after selling my pedals.

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